


There's A Statue In The Baron's Lair

by Para



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Dreen Gift, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 06:35:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16529315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Para/pseuds/Para
Summary: I'm jumping on the Dreen Gift self insert fic bandwagon.  Check the notes for warnings.





	There's A Statue In The Baron's Lair

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Gift of the Dreen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16448273) by [phoenixyfriend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend). 



> Okay, so: the rating is mostly for my swearing, otherwise it'd be G; the end was decided before anything else and it's not a happy one, but I don't know if an OC counts for major character death, or if what the Dreen do is teeeechnically killing. (I mean, effectively it is, but there's theoretical hope of resurrection so it's complicated. As fandom usually is.) It's possible I'll add more warnings as I write this, but unlikely; if so they'll probably be the typical 'mad scientists are doing terrible mad scientist things' sort of warnings that show up in Girl Genius. Also, my atheism is showing (or at least my combined annoyance with preachy organized religion and issues with authority).
> 
> Let's all hope this stays as short as I expect it to so I don't get sucked into _another_ giant fic. I only have like two days to cover, right, how long can it possibly get?
> 
> Ha... haha... ha.
> 
> ...Fuck.

_There's a statue in the Baron's lair_  
_Day and night it always stares_  
_Watching someone who's not there_  
_The statue in the Baron's lair_

_There's a statue in the Baron's lair_  
_You'd think that you could cut its hair_  
_Or steal its hat if you're not scared_  
_Of the statue in the Baron's lair_

_There's a statue in the Baron's lair_  
_When the Baron's gone it'll still be there_  
_When the Empire's dead and no one cares_  
_For the statue in the Baron's lair_

The office looked thrown together, or possibly left over from some other office. Two mismatched rugs covered half the floor: one was oval, worn, with intricate patterns in dark gray, dark blue, and white, and a cluster of tears at one end; the other was rectangular, new, and solid gray. A delicate wooden hatstand teetered on top of a foot high stack of paper in one corner. Three more stacks of paper and two thick, leatherbound books covered the solid old desk which could have come from a historical schoolroom. Above my shoulder height the wall seemed to be covered with yellowish plaster, and below it was solid metal.

The man behind the desk was scowling, dressed in the same colors as the intricate old rug, and looked like my shoulder height would be about his waist height. He started scowling slightly less when the uniformed man who'd herded me into the room said something that sounded like an explanation. The uniformed man had pointedly not touched me, at least after the first time he tried and his hand went through me instead. He hadn't stopped looking disturbed since then, either, which I thought he deserved. It wasn't like he'd tried _talking_ to me before grabbing me. Not that I could understand anything he'd grumbled on the way to the office, but 'come this way please' probably wouldn't have been a difficult gesture to figure out.

I couldn't understand what he said to the man behind the desk either, or what the man said to him. The uniformed man—the first one, anyway—left hurriedly after a few more sentences. I couldn't actually tell if the man behind the desk was in a uniform of just a very fancy and militaristic outfit. If I was right about who this was I should be sure not to mention that, or I'd probably hear all about every detail that made it _obviously_ a uniform or obviously not.

The man behind the desk looked at me, said a word, and waited. From the tone it sounded like a greeting, but I didn't recognize it. I shrugged. He tried another word. I didn't recognize that one either.

Well, I was mostly sure he was trying greetings. "Hello."

His expression couldn't be called a _smile_ by any stretch, but he seemed satisfied. "Hallo—"

" _Hel_ lo," I repeated. "Hi, hey, good morning, or afternoon or evening or whatever time it is here—"

"Ah," he said, "English. You could have said so."

I could have. "I _did_ ," I said. "Close enough. Where are we? And when?"

He frowned and stared at me. It was several seconds before he asked, "Why would you ask that?"

Patience has never been a virtue of mine. Faking it has become a skill, but I've never actually possessed the trait. Lacking the trait, of course, meant I usually didn't use the skill. "Because I don't know, of course. This'll go a lot faster if you just answer me."

"What do you mean by 'this'?"

I flicked a hand, gesturing around the room. "This conversation. Figuring out what's going on. _This_. If I had something more specific I would've said it."

"I should think that you would know already."

The man behind the desk was probably about twice my brother's size, and my brother was more than twice mine. He was also wearing either a military uniform, or a very fancy and militaristic outfit. Either one was, historically, a good indication that he commanded armies. Which he certainly did, if my guess about who he was was right. Punching him would be an absolutely terrible idea, and I really wanted to do it anyway. "If I did I wouldn't have asked!"

"Ordinary people do not ask when or where they are, and I have reasons not to trust people that are not ordinary."

...That phasing thing, on the other hand. Maybe punching him... well, it would still be a bad idea; I _probably_ needed him to listen to me. But if he couldn't hit me back, maybe I could figure out reverse psychology. It worked well enough on my parents, some of the time. Trying to punch him required lunging across the desk, so the edge dug into my stomach. "Just answer!"

That phasing thing, of course, meant that my fist phased right through the hand that he would have caught it with anyway. I leaned back, folded my arms—solid again, at least to me—and glared at him. "Well fuck you too."

Instead of angry he looked intrigued. Figured that the best response I got from him so far was from attacking him. "Are you a Dreen-Gift?"

I was lost and angry and never going home; there were a lot of things I wasn't going to miss but I had no reason to think they'd be any better in this place or this time, and a lot of people I would miss, and more that would miss me. I hated feeling guilty, and as soon as I stopped being angry I was going to have a hell of a time not crying. "I don't know what a Dreen-Gift is. I got dumped here from another world by weird black cloaks with stick fingers and cone hats."

"And you phase out of reality," he said. "Or rather, out of sync with our—with my reality. We call that a Dreen-Gift."

"D'you have a bow?"

"Only on-duty military and security personnel are allowed ranged weapons while on the castle."

"That's not...." I sighed. "Nevermind."

"What should I never mind?"

I pressed my fingers against my temples, partly to press down the headache that was beginning and partly to display my frustration in a way he'd probably understand. Figures the obnoxious black cloaks could give me the ability to _phase out of reality_ but not a grasp of the present language. "It's an expression. It means I was making a silly joke about being a gift and it's not important so we should forget I ever said anything about it."

"Hm." He waited until I dropped my hands back to my sides before continuing. "It is the 27th of November, 1879, and we are on Castle Wulfenbach. How long have you been here?"

I wasn't good at dates, mainly because I hated them. I could remember which century which book had taken place in though, and _Royal Glory: King of the Madmen_ hadn't been set in eighteen-anything, so this definitely wasn't Andronicus Valois. Which left _All the Little Boy Geniuses: The Rise and Fall of the Wulfenbach Empire_. "You're Klaus Wolfinbach?"

"Wulfenbach," he corrected.

It was going to take me a while to get that right. "Wulfinbach?" He started to correct me and I waved a hand to cut him off. "I'll get it eventually, I don't know—what's this, Romanian?" I remembered that, vaguely, from the book. A footnote about translating paperwork from Romanian into additional languages as the empire expanded.

"'Wulfenbach' is German, but the primary language in use is Romanian."

"Right, well, I don't speak either of those." I knew one word of German, because 'hallo' and 'hello' were really only an accent apart. Could maybe figure out a few others, because of phonetic similarities to English words with shared roots. Might be able to recognize loanwords, if the older and possibly alternate German in use here used similar enough sounds to what English had mangled any given loanword into. Damn obnoxious cloak things. They couldn't have, oh, picked a version of me that knew _any_ part of a language that would be useful here, or merged my mind with one that knew it, or something like that. I couldn't come up with an excuse to be mad at Klaus and would be better off not mad at someone I needed to work with, so I needed to stay mad at the cloaks. "I'll learn them. Let me know if my pronunciation is so bad you don't know what I'm saying."

Klaus nodded. "How long have you been here?"

My sense of time was another thing I was terrible at; we were just running down the list in this conversation, it seemed. Even if it had been good, everything felt dreamlike just now; I was thinking about the present moment, and not the past or the future, because if I did I'd break down, crying or swearing. Crying would be more embarrassing and swearing was more likely, but neither would get anything _done_. "Not long. Ten minutes, an hour, something like that."

He nodded again. "Why are you here?"

I gestured to the room again. "Here as in right here, or here as in this world and time?"

"The latter."

I shrugged. "The cloak things want some things changed, but not too many things."

"Dreen."

"What?"

"The cloak things are called Dreen," Klaus said. "Thus, Dreen-Gift. People gifted to... significant times or people, by the Dreen."

Right, I had a shorter name to be mad at. "Well, the Dreen are fucking unhelpful, so I don't know what they want me to do, except it's got something to do with you and your empire."

He looked pained. "I do not have an empire, and I do not intend to have one. Is it common to swear very much where you come from?"

"You fucking do," I said, mostly to make him wince again. Instead he only looked mildly annoyed. "Or if you don't, you will. And I had a friend who counted once and got more than a fuck per second for thirty seconds." _That_ got the pained look again. I sighed. "I mostly swear when I'm mad. You're still gonna have an empire. How much have you conquered now? You've got the air castle so you've at least started."

"Dreen-Gift indeed," he muttered, and frowned at the paperwork on his desk. He looked back up a few seconds later. "What is your name?"

"Nicole."

"Really?"

"No." I grinned. I probably looked a bit crazy, but considering the world I was in now that shouldn't stand out much. "But I traded for it once so it's kinda mine, and I like it better than my real names, and I don't _exist_ here so I get to have whatever name I want, so I'm Nicole. Be glad I'm not gonna call myself Ebony Firefox Willow-wisp Obsidian Fae. ...Hm, you know what, actually, I like Nicki better, let's go with that."

It's really fun to watch people visibly decide that they do not, in fact, want to know. I'm an asshole; I've given up on not being one. It's more productive to just direct the asshole tendencies to people who either deserve or will appreciate it. Or, if all else fails, people that can handle it without being upset.

"Nicki it is," Klaus said. "What can you help me with?"

That was a question I would have preferred not to think about, but that didn't make it less important. I sighed, and pressed the fingers of one hand against my temple again. The headache wouldn't be going away any time soon, but I got them a lot; I was so used to ignoring them I sometimes forgot they were there. I never did figure out if that counted as the headaches going away as long as I forgot. "Good question, and hell if I know." There weren't any chairs in the room except the one Klaus was sitting on, so I moved over to half sit on the end of the desk. I had to twist a bit to face him, but the desk was a bit lower than most desks and tables, easy for me to perch on. "You should really get a desk your size. That's not special advice," I added when he raised an eyebrow. "You just look ridiculous."

"Any spark sitting at a desk and doing paperwork instead of science _is_ ridiculous."

"Yeah, well, I hate politics too, and here you've got us both stuck with it, so don't complain to me." Ah, so I _could_ find an excuse to be mad at Klaus! I was still going to be mad at the Dreen, though; they might not have dumped me here if Klaus hadn't started his in-denial empire, but he hadn't known it would have anything to do with me. The Dreen had picked me out of every possible person in multiple worlds, given me more threats than explanation and neither choices nor help before dumping me here. I'd be able to stay mad at them for a long time. "What do _you_ think you need help with?"

Klaus frowned, but his eyes drifted away from me, over the half-plastered walls of the room. "I would have said I do not need help," he said. "Or that any possible help can't be relied upon." I rolled my eyes; he didn't see, eyes still on the corner with the teetering hat rack. "It is _believed_ that Dreen-Gift have a purpose, but without knowing what that purpose is...?" He glanced back to me; I shook my head. "Then it seems we are better off considering this situation a... resource, of a sort, since we can not know what purpose the Dreen have."

A _resource_ for him, maybe. My whole existence. I couldn't say it was new, though, even if this seemed a little more permanent than previous episodes. "We're still back to what help you think you need, then. From someone who has partial knowledge of the next... oh, somewhere between fifteen and twenty years."

He nodded absently, and his eyes wandered over the wall on the other side. "What sort of partial knowledge?"

"I read a book. Two books, only one was about you. Wrote my final papers on them." I held my hand up and tilted it from side to side, a balancing, approximating gesture that Klaus probably wasn't familiar with. He could figure it out; I had better shit to do than train myself out of gestures like that. "Fictional history in my world. Real in yours, I assume." I'd been supposed to read real histories for a history class, and write about recurring patterns and strategies through history, and read an original novel and a novel that 'reacts to and reflects on' that first for a literature class, and write about how the second book carried over themes from the first. I picked _Royal Glory_ and _Little Boy Geniuses_ because I hadn't thought of anything else by the due dates, in the full expectation that both professors would tell me to fuck off and come with with something that fit the actual assignment, and gotten away with doing them for both classes instead. The history professor probably decided to go along with it because he liked me ever since I complained about a fake documentary misrepresenting what he'd taught us in sexist ways; the English professor, I think, was just sick of my bullshit. " _All the Little Boy Geniuses: The Rise and Fall of the Wulfenbach Empire_."

Klaus's focus zeroed in on me, scowling harder than he had been when I'd first come into the office. "Fall. How does it fall?"

"There's—"

The world blurred; there was roaring in my ears, the sort of sound I imagined would suit a tsunami the seconds before it hit. My skin and the marrow of my bones felt like there was electricity in them, like I'd accidentally stuck my fingers in a socket yet again but through my entire body, and it kept going. My instinct was to wrap my arms around myself but I couldn't feel them to tell if I'd actually done it, or see anything when I looked down but bright colors on glaring white, a painfully dazzling aurora.

I had, once I got my senses back. My ears still hummed like there was an old incandescent bulb next to them, and I'd somehow fallen onto my knees next to the desk, and my arms were wrapped around myself. I was gasping. I gulped in air, closed my mouth, and forced myself to breathe through my nose instead.

**_"You are not to say so much."_ **

It took too much effort for lifting my head to in any way resemble it snapping up, but I glared at the cloak thing as soon as I could see it. Dreen. Whatever. "That's a fucking _warning_?"

**_"You will not heed less."_ **

I might. Probably not. I wouldn't follow orders with less of a threat behind them, but I would have at least considered their advice if they'd given me a _reason_ not to say something. Dreen weren't big on advice or reasons, apparently. You'd think extradimensional beings that could see the future and yank me out of one world into another would also be able to know that I wasn't big on all-powerful authorities that gave lots of orders and no reasons. "I can't listen if you don't talk," I snapped.

 ** _"Do not say so much,"_** the Dreen said, and vanished.

I groaned, closed my eyes and let my head drop back down.

A few seconds. I counted breaths, and after the fourth I made myself unwrap my arms and clamber back to my feet. I wasn't sure if I could have stood on my own; I felt shaky like I did after the really hard races in high school. I'd always managed to stand after those if I had to, but in a race I had control of what I did; I could push myself as hard as I thought I'd be able to without hurting myself, and not any harder. Who knew what the Dreen's "warning" had done. So I pulled myself up with the desk, and leaned against the edge of it once I was standing.

"It seems you can not tell me how my empire falls." Klaus was out of his chair when I glanced over, standing near where the Dreen had been and scowling at the air it had vanished into. Just as absurdly big as he'd seemed while sitting down, if not more. Physics had allowed much larger animals, including much larger terrestrial mammals, but it still seemed like breaking a law of physics for a human to be that ridiculously giant. My home's physics, anyway, which didn't matter anymore.

I, apparently, had been crying; my face was wet. I turned my head so I could press one side and then the other against my shoulders to dry it. Klaus would probably be unhappy if I pulled my shirt up to dry my face with. "Apparently not."

"Hm." He frowned at the spot, then turned to move back to his chair. "Can you tell me if I am the last ruler of the empire?"

I hummed as he sat down to show I was considering it. Klaus sat, folded his hands on the desk, and waited.

I still didn't know what the Dreen considered too much for me to tell. Clearly they weren't going to be telling me; the only way I'd find their limits would be by testing and running into them. That wouldn't be fun, but it probably wouldn't kill me; the effects of the Dreen's warning seemed to be wearing off already. I still felt worn out and shaky, but in a way that meant the warning had snapped me out of being angry, not anything that seemed supernatural. Or extradimensional, whatever the Dreen were.

I needed to know those limits. I needed to know how they measured them; "do not say too much" could refer to either certain pieces of information that weren't to be shared, or it could mean that I was only allowed to share a certain amount of information regardless of what that information was. The former seemed more likely especially with the warning, but it could be that I was only allowed to share a very small amount of information, or a small amount per day, and the full explanation of how the Wulfenbach Empire fell was too much. There _was_ a lot of information involved in it.

The sooner I figured it out the better. _Royal Glory_ had been my favorite of the two books and the one I'd paid the most attention to because it had been more about the social side of political intrigue, while _Little Boy Geniuses_ had focused more on military tactics. Still, they'd had common themes, and more importantly, a common subject.

I hadn't wanted to be here. I hadn't known I _could_ be here. If I had I still wouldn't have wanted to, but I probably would have agreed if I'd been asked. This was an empire, and it was going to cover most of Europe; that was a lot of people, and I wouldn't have _direct_ influence on their lives, but Klaus seemed willing to listen to me as an advisor. He seemed to _want_ to listen to me as an advisor, though I doubted that he cared about the same things I did. He _didn't_ seem to want to listen to anyone else for advice, going by the descriptions in the book and his comment about not trusting any possible help to be reliable.

The point of it all was that there was an empire full of people, and I had an ability to help them that as far as I knew no one else did, so I had a responsibility to do as much as I could. And the sooner and better I figured out the Dreen's limits on what I said, the sooner and better I could figure out how to work around those limits to be as effective as possible.

I said "no," first, and then "you're not the last ruler of the Wulfenbach Empire."

We waited, but nothing happened. I sighed. "Okay. I can work with that."

"So can I," Klaus said.


End file.
